It is not just shameful for a contemporary American poet to use rhymes, it is unthinkable. It seems banal to him; he fears banality worse than anything, and therefore, he uses free verse - though free verse is no guarantee against banality.
Interpretation
The quote reflects a poet's struggle with the constraints of tradition versus the fear of being unoriginal.
In this quote, Joseph Brodsky critiques contemporary American poetry, suggesting that poets often reject traditional rhyming schemes in favor of free verse due to a fear of being perceived as banal or unoriginal. This implies that the aversion to rhyme has become so strong that poets believe using it is shameful, yet they still risk producing work that may lack originality despite their chosen form.
In practice
An introduction to a poetry reading where this quote can be used to discuss the evolution of poetic forms.
Basically, it's hard for me to assess myself, a hardship not only prompted by the immodesty of the enterprise, but because one is not capable of assessing himself, let alone his work. However, if I were to summarize, my main interest is the nature of time. That's what interests me most of all. What time can do to a man.
One always pulls the trigger out of self-interest and quotes history to avoid responsibility or pangs of conscience.
On the whole, infinity is a fairly palpable aspect of this business of publishing, if only because it extends a dead author's existence beyond the limits he envisioned, or provides a living author with a future he cannot measure. In other words, this business deals with the future which we all prefer to regard as unending.
The invention of ethical and political doctrines, which blossomed into our own social sciences, is a product of times when things appeared manageable. The same goes for the criticism of those doctrines, though as a voice from the past, this criticism proved prophetic.
Try not to pay attention to those who will try to make life miserable for you. There will be a lot of those - in the official capacity as well as the self-appointed.
To put it in plain language, Russia is that country where the name of a writer appears not on the cover of his book, but on the door of his prison cell.
In a broader sense, the rhythms of nature, large and small - the sounds of wind and water, the sounds of birds and insects - must inevitably find their analogues in music.
It's weird what can trigger the beginning of a song or some bars. It can be a banging slice of apple pie or it can be smelling a certain perfume or something.
In the olden days, everybody sang. You were expected to sing as well as talk. It was a mark of the cultured man to sing.
Art is enchantment and artists have the right of spells.
In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.
I don't believe in competitions between artists. This is insane. Who has the authority to say someone is better?
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